According to the Post, the reason for the administration’s feverish effort to get legislation to expand its surveillance powers under FISA is that earlier this year a FISA Court judge declared a key portion of the administration’s program illegal. The ruling of course was secret. And it seems that until now the White House had kept this information hidden form Congress.

So why are we finding this out now? Well, that’s another interesting story. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) went on Fox News Tuesday night and discussed the whole thing. But the very existence of the ruling is highly classified. So it seems he publicly revealed highly classified information.

This isn’t the first time that Republicans have spread classified information around to heck and back just to score political points — and I’m not just talking about blowing the cover of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame.

Remember the Cox Report? The Gingrich- and Hastert-led Republican Congresses of the 1990s thought it was a brilliant idea to use the Cox Report to publicly release highly classified nuclear weapons data while they falsely accused Bill Clinton and Wen Ho Lee of selling our nuclear secrets to the Evil Red Chinese. Now Gingrich and Hastert’s successor, John Boehner, is pulling the exact same crap. Charming.

To which I say: Go right ahead, George. The DCCC and DSCC are already kicking the RSCC and RCCC’s butts when it comes to fundraising. Your boys and girls need the August fundraising time more than ours do. (Oh, and if you go through with this, guess what? No recess appointments for you! Plus, we get to hold more hearings and maybe even have time to draft articles of impeachment.)

Here’s an ACLU site Firepups can use to tell the Democrats in Congress that sticking around is not only the right thing to do, it helps them and really hurts the GOP. More phone numbers are here: